Tuesday, December 17, 2013

On
the fertile agricultural plain surrounding Parma, Italy, you can drive for days
while visiting the region's spectacular Renaissance towns, churches and villas
(below, the view from the terrace of the Castello di Fontanellato) without ever laying eyes on a single cow that gives the milk that is aged to
its glorious Parmesan cheese, nor will you ever see one of the pigs that
eventually yield its succulent Parma ham. One dines spectacularly
well there, even by Italian standards, but exactly how this is achieved is
one of Parma's small mysteries—though an occasional noxious breeze, pungent enough
to strip paint, will assure you that these beasts do indeed lurk somewhere hidden in those broad green fields, just beyond sight.

Franco
Maria Ricci, the legendary publisher, lives on his ancestral lands in
Fontanellato, which he has transformed according to his own unique aesthetic
vision. He is the man who near single-handedly revived the work of the great
neoclassical typographer, Giambattista Bodoni, who had made Parma
his home in the late eighteenth century. Ricci comes from ancient Parmesan
nobility and has dedicated his life to the cultivation and dissemination of all
that is extraordinary, remarkable and beautiful, by way of the pages of his
namesake magazine, FMR ("the most beautiful magazine in the world") and a host of magnificent publications.
Fortuitously, pronouncing his initials in French yields the word ephémère,
ephemeral, and it is this aura of felicity and harmony that this most
cultivated of men has cultivated throughout his life, seemingly effortlessly.

This
past summer, I spent several days with friends visiting Ricci and his charming
companion, Laura Casalis, who graciously welcomed us with their generous
hospitality. A warm, sunny day was reserved for visiting Ricci's estate, and
after traversing miles of sun-struck, open fields with barely a poplar in
sight, we passed a simple modern gate and drove down a long, shaded
and sun-dappled allée of bamboo to find ourselves in another world—a verdant
compound set in a bamboo glade that could just as well be found in Mexico. An
old farm building has been converted into a contemporary entertaining space of
impressive scale—an aerie looking into the bamboo canopy, with an inky-dark
lake to one side.

The
contrast between the sun-struck fields without and the bamboo forest (or
perhaps jungle) within was vivid and delightful; Ricci has crafted his own
private world—even his own private micro-climate. Further on, Ricci has
renovated the ground floor of the crumbling ancestral villa into an elegant
suite of rooms with a barrel-vaulted, neoclassical library which houses the
largest collection of Bodoni's printed works in the world. Like the vast,
Barragan-esque patio compound, the neoclassical grotto beneath the overgrown ruins is a complete, shocking, satisfying surprise.

Further on, some ten minute's walk, lies the most remarkable
of all Ricci's marvels, his bamboo labyrinth, covering 17.5 acres, by a factor of five the largest
maze in the world. The labyrinth, of course, is an ancient cipher representing
man's path through life; its circuitous course, from periphery to center,symbolizes life's journey from ignorance to
self-knowledge and enlightenment.

The plan of Ricci's labyrinth, two overlapping squares,
evokes Renaissance fortifications, and over a dozen species of bamboo have been
planted to form its high, dense allées. Inside its precincts he has constructed
a museum and study center which will house his library and collections, as well
as a visitor's center.

The compound, built of warm rose Roman brick, is
designed in a neoclassical vocabulary and laid out in a series of symmetrical,
generously scaled courtyards, perhaps better called atria.

A triumphal arch
greets visitors entering the compound, and the main axis culminates with yet
another surprise, a pyramidal folly.

The scale of the undertaking is commensurate with the
audacity of Ricci's vision. He chuckled when he said, leading us unerringly through
the maze, that no one would be allowed to enter the labyrinth without a portable
phone, but indeed the rule will be necessary once the kilometres of paths are opened to the
public.

On a final note, Rizzoli has recently published Ricci's book, Labyrinths; needless to say, it too is exceptional.

Friday, December 6, 2013

Mon dieu! Where to begin? the French government, in a bout of historical amnesia, has decided to erect a nationwide network of electronic
"éco-tax" barriers straddling its major highways (which have been
privatized into corporate-owned toll-roads, but that is another matter) to collect an environmental tax
upon the country's long-distance truckers.

Well, apparently this was the tax too far, the impot that broke the
camel's back, and Brittany—that poor, agrarian and fiercely self-aware region
that French nationalism never fully managed to tame—has gone into open revolt.
Red Phrygian caps, or "red bonnets," symbol of the French revolution of 1789, have become all the rage, sported by enraged citoyens who gather to wave the Breton flag and to set fire to these newly erected electronic tax barriers, while the nation's truckers have organized to block the country's major vehicular arteries for the last several weekends.

Open revolt. That, in a nutshell, is what is currently
brewing en ce pays-ci, which coincides with record levels of popular discontent
with the government and a record-low approval rate for the Président de la
République, François Hollande. Hollande has plumbed the lowest depths
of approval (and conversely the apex of popular disapproval), reaching 16%
overall approval in the latest national polling—just nine percentage points ahead of the US Congress.

Meanwhile, the country's préfets, akin to county executives, sent a confidential, leaked memo to the Elysée that stated in the starkest of
terms that conditions in France are a "tinderbox," that the
populace has never been more resentful of the unrelenting onslaught of
increasing taxes and stagnating incomes, and that the government had better
take heed of, and gingerly diffuse, this volatile situation or face a "fronde sociale," or popular revolt.

A few tidbits of history, to put all this in perspective.
The last time France had a revolution, in 1789, it was incited by increasingly onerous taxation by a deeply indebted government, culminating with the construction of a physical Berlin wall of tax barriers about Paris, imprisoning the city's populace (we even blogged about it, here).

Also note the uncanny resemblance of President Hollande to
Louis XVI, and the uncanny resemblance of his policies to those of the late,
beheaded monarch: blind allegiance to
the status quo in the face of increasing popular discontent during a prolonged period of deepening economic adversity. One should
also remark that Hollande shows none of the creativity or intestinal fortitude
necessary to reddress the mounting crisis of confidence in the
competence and direction of the French government itself, to say nothing of a fundamantal realignment, overwhelmingly demanded by the citizenry, of its implacably oppressive tax structure.

Today, the New York Times reports that the
populist, far-right Front National is the most popular political party in
France, with the Socialist Party of Hollande trailing badly. You do not need to
be an oracle or a political pundit to divine that the present moment is about the absolute worst time for the government to re-erect a modern version of the tax barriers that incited the French
Revolution.

Monday, December 2, 2013

We're delighted to announce that Paris' premier bookstore, the august Librarie Galignani on the rue de Rivoli, will be hosting an evening celebrating publication of Central Park NYC on the fourth December--hélas by invitation only, but we hope if you have recieved your invitation that you'll join us then.

We will give a short talk about the book and Central Park, and then be available to sign copies. These are festive evenings that mingle current events and the love of books, and Galignani has created a wonderful authors' program that has made it a center of Parisian culture. Needless to say, we are honored and are looking forward immensely to the soirée.